Learn Japanese

Sunday, July 16, 2006

Japanese is a language spoken by over 127 million people, mainly in Japan, but also by Japanese emigrant communities around the world. It is considered an agglutinative language and is distinguished by a complex system of honorifics reflecting the hierarchical nature of Japanese society, with verb forms and particular vocabulary which indicate the relative status of speaker and listener.

The Japanese language is written with a combination of three different types of glyphs: Chinese characters (called kanji), and two syllabic scripts, hiragana and katakana. The Latin alphabet (called rōmaji) is also often used in modern Japanese, especially for things such as company names, advertising, and when inputting Japanese into a computer.

Now that we know a little about Japanese language let's learn something useful.